


Expecting Someone Else?

by Hattingmad



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-08
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hattingmad/pseuds/Hattingmad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are always misunderstandings between James and Elizabeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Love or Indigestion

Elizabeth Swann is bored.

Bored, displeased, annoyed and generally hacked-off.

Another of Daddy’s endless meetings disguised as parties, then, with banalities to be exchanged and reprimands to be given (“Now, Elizabeth, please behave yourself around Admiral Beckells” or, in an ill-disguised hint: “He’s not that old, Elizabeth, he’s only forty-three. He’d make any woman a good husband.”) Daddy is eternally scheming and matchmaking, but all his hopes for her future happiness are pinned on men who are so old and whiskery, each duller than the next. She’d simper at every last one of them if he had his way, which he won’t, of course, but he need not know that.

“Elizabeth, darling, light of my life—” She rolls her eyes at his choice of endearments. “There’s someone here I think you’ll be very pleased to see!”

My God, she thinks, could he trill his words any more obviously? This potential suitor must be hideous indeed, for Daddy to talk him up so. Her temper flares.

“Daddy, we’ve already been here for four hours, most of which I’ve spent in trivial conversation, if one could call it that, with heavily paunched men twice my age whose idea of being clever is making mortifying jokes about my childhood! What next?” Yet, ever the dutiful daughter, she trudges into the drawing room after him to see… well, nothing, quite frankly, apart from the draperies.

“What fresh hell,” she mutters to herself.

“I had hoped you’d be rather more enthusiastic about my return,” murmurs a dry, sardonic voice from the vicinity of her right elbow.

Elizabeth shrieks and whirls around, her hands instinctively raised into claws, emitting a battle cry that sounds like “Hrrwaaugh!”

Standing beside her, arms clasped behind his back, a stray lock of hair (no doubt having tumbled from his queue) falling endearingly over his eyes, is James.

“James!” She squeals in equal parts delight and embarrassment. “I’m so sorry! I thought you were another stuffy whiskery old man I’d have to chat up for Father’s sake.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” he says ruefully, rubbing a hand over his jawline. “Although I’m not so sure the whiskery bit isn’t true.”

“Oh, James, I’ve missed you so,” she exclaims. Without further ceremony, she flings herself into his arms. “You wicked man, don’t ever leave for that long again! Six months you were gone. I thought I should die of the loss!”

James holds her tightly despite all sense of propriety, marveling at the difference six months has wrought in Elizabeth. She is practically a woman now, and a fine one at that. She has become a thing of beauty and more dear to him than gold.

“Tell me,” he says, smiling, “do you greet all your father’s associates and potential suitors with such a display of ferocity?”

She has the grace to blush and smile prettily at him, batting the long eyelashes it seems she has just acquired for the purpose of flustering him.

“Of course not, James. Only the people who matter get to hear my battle cry.” She squeezes his hand in her small one, and James thinks he might be in love. Well, it’s either that or indigestion.

* * *

Elizabeth Swann is the ocean, tempestuous and cruel, and though James is drowning in her depths, he still begs for rain, for he feels parched and beached and lost at sea. His world shatters and is trodden upon by pirates wearing ridiculous kohl on their eyes and steel-makers who forget their places.

Most especially he is trodden on by beautiful women in delicate shoes who take no notice of the crunching noise his heart makes when they say two words: “It is.”

That’s all it takes.

James Norrington has been gravely mistaken in his assessment of Elizabeth Swann. He has hoped, nay, believed, that she could be trusted with the care of his heart. He has deluded himself that she would have returned his affections in time, had it not been for the pirate (she was ever too curious about dangerous things, he reflects). He has told himself that when she looks at the blacksmith it is merely infatuation in her eyes, that she will come to her senses and see the error of her pirate-riddled ways. That she will not harm him.

Yet this is where her heart truly lies. Not with him, and his heart shatters. James does not know this woman standing before him at all.

This is not his Elizabeth. He has been blind— his Elizabeth has already been consigned to the depths of this strange woman’s ocean, and James has thrown his heart away on a lie.


	2. Sleeping with Ghost Pirates

She must be a ghost, or a dream. It is the only possible explanation.

She cannot possibly be here, in a bar in Tortuga soaked with rum and wearing men’s clothes and possibly having bashed him over the head with a bottle and associating with pirates this intimately and in such a smelly way.

She cannot possibly have seen him issue his drunken, despairing challenge to all and sundry in his most pathetic of states, just begging for death— any death at all, his or someone else’s, it doesn’t really matter at this point.

He’s bound for the hangman’s noose for losing everything that mattered, his ship and his commission and his crew. Oh, God, his crew. And her, too. He lost. He is the loser. Emphatically.

Even if Jack Sparrow really was rooting for him, which James suspects was highly sarcastic, but then you could never tell with him.

But she cannot be here, lifting his head out of the pigsty and the mud and the dirt and filth and his ruined wig and his ruined life so gently with her delicate fingers and her soft touch and her quiet voice.

“Oh, James, what has the world done to you?” This is surely a hallucination, but the best possible sort. He has hallucinated her many times before now and in many painful situations, but generally she is with Turner and she is taunting him, not soothing him. His dreams are never this vivid, this real, this forgiving.

It is remarkable that she does not know. She truly seems not to. What has the world done to him? What has she done to him would be a better question. The answer, of course, would be nothing he wanted and everything he didn’t.

What has he not done, for that matter, in pursuit of her, and all of it come to nothing. What has the world done to him?

“Nothing I didn’t deserve,” he tells the dream (strange dream, though, for her to be dressed as a pirate, when it’s a fate he’s always wanted her to avoid) and droops back into the muck.

 

It is only after he is aboard the Pearl and several buckets of water have been sloshed into his face and he has emptied the contents of his stomach overboard and Jack Sparrow has told him he smells funny that he is vaguely aware he is not dreaming, more’s the pity. He devoutly wishes he was still with the pigs. They were company he could understand.

* * *

James could not pinpoint, precisely, the moment at which this godforsaken voyage and ship and crew and all of it became, to a minuscule degree, better. He suspects it has something to do with the positioning of Elizabeth’s hammock in close proximity to his.

So she isn’t sleeping with Sparrow yet, then. She stays with the crew, unperturbed by the fact that they were once ghost pirates who wanted her blood. She is almost friendly with them. Himself excepted, of course. They bicker and snarl at each other and exchange what could only be termed significant glances, but they are most certainly not friends. Small wonder, really, since he’s the only member of the crew she knows she can trust. She need not bother securing his friendship. She already has his painfully undying love, or what sharp black splinters are left of it after the gangrene that is piracy took hold of him.

James lies rigid in the stifling darkness, listening to the varying degrees of snoring done by the crew around him, and Elizabeth’s hammock gently swings toward his. In her sleep, her hand reaches out blindly, looking for something to hold onto for reassurance. It finds James’s arm and tugs it toward her. She clings to it, hugging it tightly against her chest. This leaves the rest of James at a rather odd angle- half out of his hammock and half into hers- but he wasn’t sleeping anyway, so really what’s the bother?

This is the closest he will ever be to Elizabeth again. He may as well enjoy it as best he can.

She sleeps like the dead, he discovers, when during the night the awkward angle prevails at last and he falls to the floor with a thump, bringing her and his other arm with him. Bits of him are tingling numbly, other bits are throbbing painfully. She stirs but does not wake. She merely curls herself into his body heat more solidly, sighs contentedly and sleeps on.

James notes absently that Elizabeth also snores, but when she does it, it is soft and delicate like the rest of her is meant to be.

“Hrroooouungh whufflewhufflessnrgh.”

Well, he amends, perhaps not so delicate.

In the morning she apologizes profusely, scrambling off and away from him as quickly as possible.

“I must have thought you were Will,” she says sheepishly, though they both know perfectly well that she has never slept with Turner. It is a high point of debate amongst the crew as to when the two of them will get married, if ever. James lets the lie pass, though he is heavily sick of deceit. He cannot bother himself to correct her on it.

“You snore,” he says instead, curtly, and leaves for breakfast amidst her spluttering protests that she most certainly does no such thing. There is a lady inside her still, indignant and not half-spoiled. The rest of the crew, he knows, will tease her mercilessly for a week or so, and then it will be forgotten and buried like so much treasure out at sea.

 

He is, again, mistaken about Elizabeth Swann. She says nothing the next night when she crawls into her hammock in its customary place beside his, but he notices she has tied them together so he will not crash to the ground, should she steal his arm again. She does, and she sleeps huddled up against his back for warmth and comfort every night for a solid week before he gives up the ghost and allows himself to hold her while she sleeps.

So this is what it is like to share sleeping space with her, he thinks. She steals all the covers and takes up more than her share of the bed, not to mention her snoring, but he doesn’t mind somehow. They don’t talk about it after the first night. There are some secrets that are better left untouched.

James understands, and sighs, and continues to swab the deck with the tears he refuses to shed for her, and never in front of her.


	3. Not Dead Yet

Elizabeth Swann, newly divorced, is sitting in a tavern in Tortuga, nursing a drink. Barbossa came back to get her once he’d commandeered the ship, of course.  _He_  wasn’t going to leave her there on a bloody island for ten years, which was one of the many things she and Will had fought about as soon as they’d had the time.

It’s always surprising to realize that once the sexual tension and life-threatening danger have gone out of the relationship, you’re laying in a dank cave somewhere next to a literally heartless man with ridiculous fashion sense and a hyperactive moral code, rather than the swashbuckling pirate you thought you were marrying. As one might expect, disillusionment is never pretty.

 

Her drink has a pineapple in it, and it’s a vaguely cloudy blue. The pineapple is a detail she insisted on, despite odd looks from the barman, and it makes her feel better. She wasn’t previously aware thatTortuga had fruity non-rum drinks. She suspects this one is still rum-based. She doesn’t really care. Someone buys her another drink. This one tastes a bit like coconut. She slurps enthusiastically and appreciatively at it. Elizabeth follows the tavern wench’s gaze to the far end of the room at a man who is sitting in the shadows. He tips a nonexistent hat to her.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he says as she sits at a table next to his, wanting to thank him for the drink.

“Er, do I know you? It’s a bit dark, I’m afraid I can’t really see, and I am a bit squiffy, so if you don’t mind-” The man stands up and steps into the light. 

Elizabeth falls off her chair. Her mouth opens and closes several times like a fish. Blue liquid dribbles out of the side of her mouth. She blinks rapidly.

“ _James_?!” She splutters. “I thought you were-”

“Who, Elizabeth,” he asks, feeling infinitely tired. “Who did you think I was this time? I’m not Will. I’m not Jack Sparrow, I’m not Captain Barbossa or your father or a stuffy old man with whiskers or any of the number of people you seem to mistake me for.”

“Dead,” she says quietly, tears pricking her eyes. “I thought you were dead.”

“Oh.” He ponders this for a moment. “Well, I’m not.”

“I can see that.”

“I’m sorry to have upset you. If it bothers you that much, I’ll try to die again, for real this time.” She slaps him across the face.

“Don’t you DARE! Oh, James…” She clings to him and begins sobbing brokenly. James is bewildered, incapable of dealing with the rapid change of emotions she is exhibiting.

“Er,” he says awkwardly, and pats her on the back. “There, there.” She looks up at him and shakes her head fondly.

“You’re terrible at comforting people,” she says, but she is smiling through her tears.

“I know.” His brows knit together in consternation at that fact.

“You’re also terrible at declaring your feelings. And having feelings, I sometime suspect.”

“Now that’s entirely untrue,” he says stiffly, hurt. “Just because I don’t ponce about in ridiculous hats stealing other people’s fiancées and declaring my love in a dramatic way does not mean I don’t have feelings.”

This is a ridiculous and bizarre conversation. James feels whimsical, possibly for the first time in his life. He also feels, possibly for the first time in his relationship with Elizabeth Turner-Swann, that he has the upper hand.

He pokes her in the nose. Her eyes widen in shock and something like admiration. “You just never took the time to find out.”

“I wanted to,” she says, picking at her fingernails.

“You loved Will Turner,” he counters. “Didn’t you?”

“Er, well…” she mutters and turns bright red. “You know he’s the Captain of the Flying Dutchman now?” She says too brightly, flailing for conversation.

“I’m aware. He’s the one who brought me back.” James decides he likes having the upper hand. He does not want to relinquish it any time soon.

“Oh,” she says. She looks wildly around the room, perhaps seeking escape or someone she knows so she can hail him down and end this awkwardness.

James does not intend to let her.

“So I imagine he told you all about our catastrophic, marriage-ending fight,” she says, correctly concluding that she is going to have this conversation, like it or not.

“I’m told it included lots of throwing things about and hurling accusations,” he concedes, a smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth, even though it is entirely inappropriate.

“Especially mine about him only ever being an infatuation and not knowing a real,  _noble_ man if one bit him on the nose.” She laughs, but the sound is brittle and forced. “That had a lot to do with you sacrificing your life for me, of course.”

“Did it?”

“Yes. That was terrible timing, by the way.”

“Better late than never?” He hazards, trying to get a word in edgewise. A feeling of triumph wells up from deep within. 

 _The_   _Turner boy was just an infatuation! **HA!**_    ** _I KNEW IT!_**

They are uncharitable feelings for the man who brought him back from the other side of death, but James allows himself to indulge in them just the once. Elizabeth thinks about it for a moment, then nods.

“Yes. Better late than never.” She looks at him expectantly. James wonders feverishly if there is something he ought to be doing right now, something he’s forgotten. Damn. She has somehow reclaimed the position of smirky all-knowingness. He frowns.

“Well?” She demands. Always demanding things of him, that Elizabeth Swann. “I tell you I divorced my husband mainly on account of you when, I might add, I thought you were dead, and you’re still not going to kiss me?”

Oh. That.

He lifts her up in his arms, and her feet dangle off the floor.

“I might, if you ask nicely.”

“James,” she says levelly, “you’re about to find out just how nice I can be.”

“Am I?” He says, delighted by this turn of events.

“Oh, yes,” she assures him.

“That’s nice,” he says faintly. “I’m going to kiss you now, and I’m going to take my time about it, and come hell, highwater, kraken, dead pirates, the end of the world or even closing hour at this tavern, I will _not_ be swayed from my purpose.”

Before she can even say ‘Good man’, he does so. Ah, yes. This is what it feels like to win. Winning feels like Elizabeth pressed up against him, sweet-smelling and tasting of fruit and kissing him back with long, slow strokes of her tongue and muffled noises in the back of her throat. It was clearly a matter of holding out long enough for her to tire of her other lovers, after all. James persists, therefore James— finally— wins.

He is not a man prone to gloating in his victory, but he is possessive and more than slightly paranoid that she is going to leave him again, and for good reason. He wonders idly if a brand or a permanent tattoo on her lips with his initials on it would be enough to dissuade would-be-suitors. Then he decides it isn’t going to matter, because he’s going to lock her up in a room with him, swallow the key and make love to her until the end of time. 

 _Yes_ , James thinks as she breathes ‘I think I love you’ against his neck,  _now that’s a good plan._


End file.
